June 2005 Archives
helen and i went to london this weekend for a party. jude and chris split the difference on their birthdates every year and have a joint party. and this one was for their fortieths, so no way helen could not be there. me too!
and something awesome happened. helen's travel agent got us bumped up to business class. i've never travelled that way before. it's amazing. there's secret clubs in the airport with free drinks and snacks. it's all very sterile and corporate, but free drinks. and seats are seriously roomy. i did the cartoonish double-take when i was able to get from the window seat to the aisle without having to wake helen. it wasn't one of those maneuvers where you're an inch from lap-dancing someone, either. and the staff aren't always telling you obvious things, or harping on the status of your seat belt. those seats just don't recline (into the lap of the poor bastard behind you), either; they have four controls! also recessed video monitor and such. hi-tech!
i slept like a baby all the way to london. i felt a bit ripped off having slacked my way out of all the luxury.
then a bad thing happened. not really a bad thing, i guess, but a harbinger of the like. my first cigarette off the plane hurt. i couldn't finish it. i only get sore throats when i get sick. i got sick. two days and one night of mini-break and i stepped of the plane into plague.
we got to anne and richard's house about eleven in the morning on Saturday. they are lovely people (including the three sons), even tho they are all chelsea supporters. lucky bastards. their team doesn't need a special ruling because, as in the case of liverpool, your team wins the champion's league but does so poorly in the premiership that without special help they can't even qualify to return next year to defend the title.
whatever.
thanks, helen, for waking me up after our nap. i would have slept until we left for the airport on sunday. it's not as funny as ab fab in real life, i'd bet. by the time we were ready to leave for the birthday party, i was halfway between cold and flu. nose gushing, bad cough, sore throat, can't catch my breath, headache, body aches, exhausted and doin' it in the bathroom like live girls!!!.
still, the party was fun, once i got the idea down that to get a real drink, you have to order triple. they're only about nine dollars each, and contain a proper amount of the booze. i think i've mentioned my disdain for measured drinks. they blow. i can't say i moved very far off my bar stool, and no need to with indoor smoking, at least not until they started ringing that bell at 11:00. i believe it was foolishness for the drug companies to pull all the alcohol out of cough syrup. sweet liquor eases the pain.
the rest of the weekend is a blurry haze of liquor, fever and hangover. helen and i went to 12 bar after the party. it's the first (or maybe last) stop on the kickstart u.k. tour. they were closed, but i stickered up the place. that was good. sunday we spent walking around camden town, which is a pretty crazy place. (i stickered that up, too.) it feels like a st. mark's place did a chinatown on the east village. there didn't seem to be nearly enough goths nor punks for all that goth/punk gear, but all the crazy restauraunts on the food district were pretty funny. the women at the chinese places hold bits of food on plastic forks and yell at passersby to try their food. "lady! lady! you taste! lady!" etc.
we were back at heathrow by 8:00 sunday night. i love that place. our tanking dollar makes duty free less of a steal than it used to be, but still: an airport where you can smoke. smoking area's in the irish pub (nice!), so food and drink, too. so beautiful. even the admiral's lounge for us business class types had these funky vacuum booths where you could smoke but have everything sucked away all neat and clean. god, i can't wait for the dual citizenship and the chance to enjoy a lengthy stay in a civilized country.
about two hours into the flight, i started in on an asthma attack.
i haven't had one in about 16 years. for scale, i was a missionary to scotland the last time. similar story, tho, only allergies triggering the attack that time. it's truly scary to not be able to beathe. i congratulate myself on only panicking briefly, but it was no fun at all. thank god i had playstaion portable and free business-class whiskey to keep me calm. asthma's just too dramatic to want to share.
home late sunday night, and back to the grind. still having some trouble with lungs and phlegm, but my smoking's way down.
damn. real life does distract a man from his blog...
good news, tho: helen gets her green card! or she will once she does her final round of biometrics (finger prints and such) that the i.n.s. wisely scheduled for july 1st, a month after our interview. it's been madness with lawyers and government and running around trying to get all the necessary documentation and letters from banks and jobs and various faderal, state and local authorities, but the i.n.s. has approved my petition for helen's green card! the interview went well despite the only copy of my birth certificate being a really bad fax, my passport calling me by different names on different pages, and helen's bold and shameless lying about her many scrapes with international authorities over smuggling exotic and endangered animals.
hoorah! thank you, government, for not deporting my wife! usa! usa! usa!
kickstart's been chaos, too. we've spent the last two weekends in the studio working on our next demo and had two shows. oddly enough, both shows went well, tho we were too drunk to remember one and too burned out to enjoy the other. studio has been very good. we decided to actually treat recording as more than just getting our music down, and so have been doing much with vocals and adding instruments and the like. get your damned selves ready, because the next kickstart release got some kazoo, motherfucker!
no lie! handclaps, too.
quote of the studio (so far): 'metal! it's gonna rock, man! it's gonna be fuckin' whitesnake!' —eric
meanwhile, our u.k. tour starts in about six weeks, and details are still very sketchy in places...
ok; back to work, which has been its own special kind of sketchy lately. just wanted to put up a quick update for those complaining (rightfully) about how boring this blog has become...
helen wasn't joking about me having to use urbandictionary.com, but it is a give and take relationship.